


Birthday Wishes

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Justice League of America's Vibe (Comics), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Episode: s01e15 Out of Time, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, unhealthy platonic relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 02:53:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15209264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: It is Dante Ramon's twenty-fifth birthday, and his little brother is found dead inside STAR Labs of a chest wound.





	Birthday Wishes

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Lady, Blaise, and Nate, who commented variations of "what the fuck" on my post about this concept. Love you lots!
> 
> This is a fic about death, mourning, having a bad relationship with someone you love, and not knowing what to do about death. The ending isn't particularly happy. But at least this timeline was erased from existence, right?

Dante, contrary to what his entire family seems to think, does not actually like his birthday. He’d rather spend it alone in his room than surrounded by all of his mother’s church friends and the rabbi from the synagogue his father goes to who _always_ shows up for some reason even though Dante has pretty sure he’s never spoken to him once.

Really, the most he can do is schedule the party for the day _before_ his actual birthday and hope that he doesn’t get dragged out anywhere on the day itself. So when the day of the party comes he plasters on a smile and listens to his mom brag about him and looks around hopefully for Cisco because at least Cisco makes things _interesting._

But Cisco doesn’t show up, and midway through the party when Dante gets away from everyone and checks his phone he sees that Cisco left him a voicemail saying that he’s sorry he couldn’t make it, but an emergency came up at work and while he’d really _love_ to be there, honestly, he can’t. Dante doesn’t call Cisco back and leave _him_ a voicemail saying that he doesn’t _sound_ that sorry. Even if he really wants to.

Cisco and Dante have basically made it a tradition at this point to pointedly ignore each other’s birthdays. Neither of them are really sure who started the tradition. Dante, guiltily, thinks that it was _probably_ him, back when he was too drunk to think straight (heh) half the time and high the other half. During the bad days when he realized that he was in his twenties and still amounting to nothing. It wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that he forgot one of Cisco’s birthdays during that time, leading to the grim tradition.

Next time Cisco has a birthday, Dante promises himself, trying to avoid a woman from temple who seems _way_ too interested in hearing about Dante’s hypothetical girlfriends for him to give her the two halves of the bad news that are an answer to that question, Dante’s going to be there for it. He’ll get Cisco something nice, too. Cisco probably thinks Dante doesn’t know how shitty of a brother he’s been since Cisco was fifteen, and especially since Dante was twenty, but… He’d be surprised.

Next time Cisco has a birthday, Dante’s going to be there for it. And not _just_ because it’d be nice to have Cisco coming back to his birthday parties, at least to make things more interesting than just running and hiding from people way older than him who only know him through the stories his mom tells them. But because… He loves him. He does. Stupid how a phone call saying that Cisco couldn’t make it to a birthday party he didn’t even want in the first place is what made him re-realize it, but… He does.

Huh. How about that. Maybe forced birthday parties are good for something after all-revelations about your semi-estranged younger brother who you have constantly fought with ever since your oldest sibling died horribly years prior.

Dante accepts presents from people who think he’s still in his teen years and are really only here to talk to his parents and eat cake, which is absolutely the best part of any birthday, so Dante can’t really blame them, at least not for that, then uses the growing headache behind his eyes as an excuse to go upstairs.

He puts on headphones and pulls up some messages on his phone and lets his real friends wish him a happy early birthday. Sure, there’s only a small handful of them, and he’s never met them in person even if they skype all the time, but how many friends do you _really_ need, anyway? As long as they appreciate your talents, it doesn’t matter how many there are. And these friends do.

He’s not actually sure if it’s the day of the party or his birthday when he hears the loud knocking on the door through his headphones but-yep, when he checks the clock, it’s the next morning. Yay. _Happy Birthday to me,_ Dante thinks as he heads downstairs, rolling his shoulders back and listening to his joints complain. He’s not _that_ old, twenty-five as of today, but apparently his body thinks he is.

Dante’s vaguely aware that he’s in the clothes from the day before-meaning the only nice suit he owns-when he opens the door to see… Cops. Shit. He can feel his mother pressing close behind him. Santino must still be coming downstairs.

“Good morning, officers,” Dante says, deciding he’s going to speak for the family. Have to be polite. They have guns. The Ramons don’t. “Can I-can _we_ help you with anything?”

“Are you Francisco Ramon’s family?” The shorter one, a woman with dark hair, asks.

Dante suddenly feels very, very far away, like the world is spinning out of control, like all he can do is cling to the door frame that’s suddenly become the only piece of driftwood he can hold onto in the storm as he whispers back _“Yes.”_

“Can we come in?” The other one-he’s blond, and tall, and maybe if this were a good day Dante would think that he was kind of hot, except it’s suddenly _not_ a good day. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not. Something’s happened to Cisco. Dante’s never prayed for his brother to have _committed_ a crime before, but there’s a first time for everything, because Cisco having been arrested is so much more preferable to-to-

Dante is pretty sure that you’re not supposed to let cops into your house unless they can provide a warrant. Armando taught him and Cisco that when he learned it in civics class. He said it would be helpful if they ever needed to hide something or someone. But his mom (suddenly all Dante wants is his mom) says yes and practically drags Dante away from the door and-

They’re saying things. They’re saying the things Dante doesn’t want to hear. Things like-

 _“I’m sorry for your loss”_ and  _"D_ _r. Snow found the body at-”_ and _“we need someone to come in and identify, just to make sure.”_

Dante volunteers before his parents have the chance to assume they're going to be doing it. He won’t ask his family to go through that. He remembers when they had to identify what was left of Armando’s body. They didn’t tell him and Cisco about it but they-they both knew that it must have been-because when they came back-

Dante doesn’t remember anything between clinging to the wall for support because these officers are flipping his world upside down and sitting in a nice chair in a well lit, comfortable room. He’s the only one there and there’s a table in front of him with pictures lying face down and a woman with a soft voice explaining that she’s going to turn them over.

She tells him that this is not like in the movies. He’s just going to see some pictures of the body on the table in the morgue. All of them will be of the face, just from different angles. All he has to do is tell her if he recognizes them as Cisco. The woman says that he can take as much time as he needs to. That if he wants to get this over with fast, that’s alright too.

“Fast,” Dante can hear himself say, and she helps him turn the photos over when his hands are shaking too hard and-

It takes him too long to recognize Cisco’s face. It’s too pale and too still and it feels wrong, so for a moment Dante feels like he’s just stepped into an elevator that’s already going down. For a moment there’s an almost sick sense of relief. Like _this isn’t Cisco._ Like he’s not actually looking at Cisco. Like there’s been a huge mistake.

Cisco shouldn’t be this still and lifeless and cold looking. Cisco should be-bright, and moving, and alive, and so warm and full of energy that he fills the whole room with it. Cisco should be-Cisco should be-maybe not how he was when he was thirteen and full of stars and promises that he was going to go to the best college in the whole _world,_ that he was going to make his big brothers proud, but how he was the last time Dante saw him. Bright. Warm. Almost smiling even as he tried to be serious.

Dante’s hands feel cold, and he can’t get them to warm up again. It doesn’t feel like it did after Armando. It doesn’t feel like that at all. When Armando was there, he’d been close with Dante and Cisco. When Armando was gone, Dante and Cisco had stuck together like glue, at least until Dante started spiralling at the same time Cisco realized just how smart he actually was.

With Cisco gone, there’s no one for him to cling to. He can’t go to his parents. It’s stupid, but they’ve never understood him. They never understood Cisco, either, but Cisco was the brightest star in the whole goddamn sky-in the end, he didn’t _need_ his parents to get him, he just needed to show the world how smart he was. How capable he was of making it a better place.

Cisco was the smartest kid their school had ever seen. Of course their parents didn’t understand him. Hell, nobody understood him. Except Dante and Armando. They were there. And Cisco was there for them, too, in all his tiny wisdom, when Armando got made fun of for being autistic and Dante came out as gay, he was _there,_ because Cisco was _constant,_ Cisco was _supposed to always fucking be there-_

Dante’s not sure how he ended up outside, vomiting his guts out in an alley, but he did. He feels numb and lost and confused and-and this was never supposed to happen. Dante was never supposed to be the last man standing. Not that he would have ever wished that on Cisco, to be the last son of three, to be the only one-no. Not Cisco. And not Armando, either.

Hell, maybe Dante deserves this. For being such a shitty brother. For being the worst brother Cisco could’ve asked for, probably. Yeah, he probably deserves this. For the first time in a long time, Dante feels that bone-tugging _need_ go get drunk, to-to do _something_ to numb the jagged pain inside his chest. He knows once he falls back down that hole he’s probably never going to get out of it again.

Dante knows that he can’t put that on his parents again. That they can’t deal with that on top of Cisco being gone. They only pulled through when Armando died because they needed to make sure Cisco and Dante were safe. They just have Dante now. He has to be strong. For them. Even if he’s not _built_ to be strong. He’s not built to take this kind of hurting. Nobody is.

All he can think about is how Cisco was always supposed to be there. That Cisco always _was_ there, when it mattered, when there was something that Dante couldn’t tell their parents about. Dante likes to think that he was for Cisco, but he knows he wasn’t. Cisco deserved a better big brother than the one he got. Maybe it should have been Dante who died instead of Armando. He’s thought that a ton of times before.

And now he’s never going to get the chance to fix that relationship. Not ever. He’s not going to get to talk to Cisco again and see that easy smile light up his face. He’s not going to get to introduce Cisco to whatever guy he starts going out with, if he ever finds someone. He’s not going to meet Cisco’s future partner. He’s not going to hear Cisco explaining some dumb math problem to him again, slowly. Cisco’s not going to go to another one of his concerts ever again. Because Cisco is _gone._

Cisco is gone. Forever. Dante’s never going to get to tell him that he’s sorry for how he treated him when he was younger and stupider and didn’t realize that Cisco was the only real friend he had. The only person who knew everything about him and cared about him anyway. The only person in the world who had known Armando like they did. Gone. Forever.

Cisco is gone, and the last words Dante will have ever heard him say will be a fake apology on a voicemail about a stupid fucking birthday party that Dante hadn’t even wanted in the first place. Not even a goodbye.

In the timeline that Barry repaired, Cisco and Dante try-rather reluctantly, and with many bumps in the road-to fix their damaged relationship, and, after a long time, they succeed.

In the timeline that never was, Dante is twenty five years old, and, for the first time in his life, completely and utterly alone.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm danteramon on tumblr.


End file.
